Root intelligence: Plants can think, feel and learn

With an underground "brain network" and the ability to react and remember, plants have their own kind of intelligence – and may even cry out in pain

By Anil Ananthaswamy

STEVE SILLETT has been hanging out with giants all his working life. He climbs and studies the canopies of giant redwoods along the coast of northern California. Sometimes, when traversing from the top of one tree to another, he is awestruck by the life that surrounds him. “There’s this awareness of where you are, 90 metres up, in this breathing, living forest of ancient beings,” says Sillett, who is at Humboldt State University, California. “You get into this space where you are interacting with another organism that functions completely differently.”

Had Aristotle hung out among redwoods, he might not have consigned plants to the bottom rungs of his “ladder of life”. But he didn’t, and botanists have been tormented by his legacy. For centuries, few dared challenge his judgement. Now that’s finally changing. In the past decade, researchers have been making the case for taking plants more seriously. They are finding that plants have a sophisticated awareness of their environment and of each other, and can communicate what they sense. There is also evidence that plants have memory, can integrate massive amounts of information and maybe pay attention. Some botanists argue that they are intelligent beings, with a “neurobiology” all of their own. There’s even tentative talk of plant consciousness.

Charles Darwin would have approved. He was the first to seriously question Aristotelian ideas that plants don’t have the stuff of life that animates us and other animals, simply because they don’t move. One of his books, published in 1880, was provocatively titled The Power of Movement in Plants

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